Tax Day Festival Of Frugality

The 121st Festival of Frugality is up at Rather Be Shopping. I loved Frugal Homemaker’s post about frugality, choices and luck. My husband and I get told that we’re lucky to be able to work from home. I guess people don’t see the years that we spent living on rice and beans, struggling to make our business work, and all the effort that still goes into it to keep it going strong.

For all of us who get so frustrated when people don’t take responsibility for their own financial situations, here’s a good rant from Amateur Asset Allocator.

Trent has a post about cloth diapering. I’m loving all the buzz that cloth diapers are getting these days. I’ve known for years that I would only use cloth diapers when we eventually had a baby, and now that we’re only a month away from meeting our little one, we’ve got a small stash of cloth diapers that I found on Craigslist and in thrift stores. My mother and I have a date later this month to sit down with her sewing machine and make a whole stack of diapers from fabric I bought used. My motivation for using cloth is equally balanced between environmental impact and frugality. So we won’t be using the dryer (drying racks work great for all our laundry) and we won’t be buying any brand new cloth diapers. Between fabric and used diapers, I’ve spent under $35 so far, and should end up with about 30 diapers. Once I start actually using/washing/drying them, I’ll let you know how it’s going…

Tired Garden has a post about his new high efficiency washer and dryer that made me want one too. I’d love to have a front-loading washer that would be easier on our clothes and use less water. But I doubt I’ll ever buy a new dryer. I only use ours for about 3 minutes per load of laundry, since I dry pretty much everything on drying racks. I only use the dryer for the stuff that wrinkles badly – I put those few things in, run the dryer for about 3 minutes, and then hang the clothes up right away to dry. No ironing, and almost no dryer time. But an HE washer would be sweet…

Not the Jet Set has a great article about collecting rainwater. I grew up in the eastern part of the country, where we had both rainy and dry seasons. Collecting rain water during the wet season made the dry months a whole lot easier. I wish we could do the same thing now, but I live in an area that gets almost no rain. So we xeriscaped most of our yard instead.